Will you knock that shit off?

Driving in to work this morning, I saw two cyclists that pissed me off.

Mind you – I’m not a hard core law and order guy. I see when some rules are ridiculous to follow, but these guys make all of us look bad.

Cyclist #1. I’m in line at the light, waiting to turn right on to Kiely from Benton. To the left, I see a cyclist coming down Kiely- his light goes from yellow to red. Does he stop? No – he turns right on to Benton, makes a big, sweeping, illegal U-turn, passes to my right, then turns right onto Keily and keeps going. I wonder what sort of self-righteousness he would have pulled had he been (unfortunately) hit during the U-turn?

But that was mice nuts, compared to the next guy.

Cyclist #2. Going down Kifer, he’s on the right a little ahead of traffic. Light turns red and I notice that he’s on the other side of the intersection. I don’t give it too much thought as I figure that he may have just missed it. Then we get to the next light – and he blows right through. Same with the light after that. Then we get up to the corner of Bowers and Kifer – he heads to the left hand turn lane and so do I. Of course, he’s going to wait until the green arrow, right? No – he goes left into the cross walk, then salmons up Kifer until he crosses over to the other side.

Again, I can see the argument for fracturing the rules every now and again, but it’s dipshits like #1 and complete assholes like #2 that give all of us a bad name! This is exactly why people hate cyclists – shit like this! I mean, true, cars cause more than their fair share of issues – no one is arguing that. But guys like this are completely, openly ignoring traffic signals.

The road to cars and bikes co-habitating on the same road is not paved with bikes cowering off to the side. But on that same note, it sure’s the hell not paved with bikes effectively telling the world “fuck off, I’m on a bike and I’ll do whatever I damn well please” either. The road is somewhere in the middle, folks. I don’t want to get doored. Drivers don’t want to have to worry about having to make a panic stop because a bike cut in front of them. Saying being guilty is OK because they’re guilty doesn’t do shit for the cause. All it does is make us look like a bunch of selfish spoiled assholes…the very kind of people we’re trying not to be like…